


dear friend

by firstaudrina



Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Character Study, Gen, a hint of Jo/Bhaer, cameos by the family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22412362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Jo might have said, “I left something for you in the old mailbox and I think that you should read it.”
Relationships: Theodore Laurence & Josephine March
Comments: 14
Kudos: 63





	dear friend

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the 2019 adaptation.

Jo might have said, “I left something for you in the old mailbox and I think that you should read it.”

If Laurie really knew her mind, then he would know then, in the way that they could devise little intrigues together without having to speak them aloud — bashing against each other on the same wild path to mischief. And it could be like it was: cold winters spent warm with laughter in a chilled attic, her sisters all around her in a whirl of activity and Laurie looking at them the way Jo did, with rapt love and approval, and her proud of him for loving them almost as sharply as she did. 

If she didn’t tell him, then he might never go look in the mailbox and she might never say a word aloud. It would fossilize in there, or turn to ash with age, and she would taste the shame of her loneliness whenever she thought of it. 

Laurie would know just from the look on her face what she had left for him to find. But perhaps he would go to read it anyway, craving the evidence in his hands the way he always wore that ring around his neck. She would be left to fret and walk the boards of the old attic, her nerves spiking with every creak beneath her soles. Her impatient brow pressed to the windowpane to track his progress through the snow. It makes her stomach ache to think of Laurie’s eyes flying over the paper, taking her words into himself. 

(Unbidden, she thinks of sitting across from the professor and watching his inscrutable face as he analyzed those tiny printed scraps. Saying to herself inside her head, _well, that earned fifteen dollars_ or _that line made Beth laugh_ with preemptory defensiveness. Feeling as though she had given him something more than a scandalous little story. Something much more.

Jo pushes this aside.)

She pictures Laurie racing back across the lawn, taking the steps three at a time, the same way he’d been at her heels in the grass that day. The door swinging inwards, the letter in his hand — Jo jumping up from the sofa and their eyes meeting, wild —

And then? Would she kiss Laurie? What would that be like? She imagines it all elbows and noses somehow, someone getting it in the ribs and someone else losing their hat. She thinks that she would laugh. Is she supposed to laugh? When it was Meg’s turn to read aloud, she would sometimes pick swooning romances — if it was very late and she was feeling shyly wanting — and none of those ladies laughed their way to the altar. Amy would have made note of it if they had. She had a way about her that was half business, as though there were regulations on kisses that must be followed to the letter for it to be a success. _Well, that one didn’t blush_ , she might say when Meg read. _So how good could it have been?_

Beth had no interest in kissing at all. Jo didn’t know where she stood. When she thought the word _kiss_ , she felt the absent press of ink-stained fingers against her mouth. She tasted the acidity of the inkwell. 

The letter hadn’t been a lie. Jo was very careful about that. It’s true that the last year without Laurie has been an ache, but it was also a year without Meg or Beth or Amy, without Marmee or Hannah. Without familiar rooms or familiar things, the smell of the air at home or the cushion of her old bed. New York was a different world and no matter how much she filled up her little room, there was still only her in it. She wrote a million letters he never answered. _My dear friend,_ she’d start them. _My splendid fellow_. 

Once they’d lain together on the attic floor in a flurry of curtains and costumes, with Jo’s papers in a messy stack on the sofa above them. Marmee was off looking after Father and they were so knotted with worry that it often tipped over into overwhelmed malaise. Beth was not sick yet. Jo’s hair was short. Amy and Meg wanted her to write a little play for when their parents got home, to welcome them. She and Laurie got a third of the way into deciding characters when she started bullying him, and then they found themselves in a heap on the floor, overexerted. Laurie was wearing his shirt open at the collar so she could see his ring and Lady Isolde’s full skirt over his trousers. He asked, “Do we look alike now?”

Jo pushed up onto her elbow to study him, though words were already spilling out of her mouth before she’d had time to really consider. “Not a whit! Though I shouldn’t mind if we did.” Her gaze roamed over his face: his bright, eager eyes and little smiling mouth. “You have a weak chin,” she decided critically. “But fine eyes and a noble brow and your hair is beautiful.” It had a way of catching the light that she found very becoming, like Meg’s: so dark that it gleamed. Jo had always thought that she wouldn’t mind looking like Laurie, if she could also step into his skin and open doors that the world had otherwise firmly closed against her. “I don’t think I carry off short hair half as well. If I were a man, I’d have to be terribly old-fashioned and keep it tied in a tail.”

He laughed, then reached up with the very tips of his fingers to brush the very end of her chin. His gaze softened in a way she usually sidestepped. “I think you’ve a nice enough face. The nicest one I’ve seen, anyway.”

“That’s a lie, I know you’ve seen Meg.” Her stomach tingled and she wrenched her face away. “Anyway, now I look like a kitchen boy in skirts. Give me your waistcoat, I’ll show you.”

“I don’t know why you complain about skirts all the time.” After divesting himself of the waistcoat and giving it over, Laurie leaned back, both hands pillowing his head and legs crossed at the ankle. The skirt was too short for all his height. “I’m terribly comfortable.”

“Because no one’s ever tried to put you in a corset.” She struck out for his middle and he scrambled to catch her first, laughter quick on his lips like always. 

“Well, if you ever decide who I’m to be in the play, you can try,” he said with ease, once they’d settled down again. “I’m useless for a man, so I might be alright for a lady.”

“I’m not sure you have the mettle.”

Again, his amusement. “You, I think, could be rather good at either without even trying.”

“I know that.” Jo laid back down too, their shoulders firmly pressed together. “I could be a great many things.”

Now the attic is as empty as Jo’s New York room. Now Beth’s things are in boxes and there are no small girls running rampant with imagination, affixing fairy wigs and cheering with unlit tobacco pipes. She might do anything to crawl back into the past where things are warm and beloved and full of possibility. She sleeps in the attic too often after Beth goes, on the sturdy little sofa that makes her back hurt. 

And the strange thing is, she often dreams of the boarding house. The doorknob under her hand beginning to turn before she can close her fingers around it, and an odd certainty about who is behind it, though she always wakes before she can get inside. She’ll hear her name — _Jo, Jo, Jo_ — and usually it’s Marmee, or sometimes even Father, calling her back to wakefulness. When she opens her eyes to see Teddy’s face, she thinks perhaps she’s still dreaming — that perhaps the door did open after all. She throws herself into his arms, all elbows as suspected, and it’s only then she knows he’s real. 

She’s so glad to see him that she doesn’t even think of their post office out in the woods, gathering snow above her paper-and-pen confession. She doesn’t think of it until Laurie says, “my wife,” and then it no longer matters what Jo might have said.


End file.
